Union group takes aim at bosses ‘social media trawling’

Ever-present surveillance at work has extended too far into ‘social media trawling’ and new laws are needed, a union group says.

A major collective of unions wants bosses to be banned from trawling their workers’ social media accounts.

A Victorian Trades Hall Council submission to the state parliament is filled with creepy and intimidating anonymised accounts of workplace surveillance.

The trades council is pushing its case for a social media trawling ban in its submission to a state upper house workplace surveillance inquiry.

“There should be a total ban on surveillance of workers and their communications when they are not at work, including a prohibition on social media trawling,” the submission reads.

The representative body wants Privacy in Working Life Act legislation brought in.

A host of software used around the globe tracks workers’ productivity.

A litany of purported first hand examples submitted to the parliament show surveillance in modern work places extends far beyond Instagram stories about political issues.

Workers in retail, warehouses, social services, hospitality and education feel surveyed by cameras, AI models and by managers having access to emails.

“Myself and others walking on eggshells, feeling spied upon, marginalised, bullied. Lowered self esteem of myself and others. Feeling pressured and cowed. Afraid. Under surveillance, intimidated,” a community services worker says in the submission.

“I was recorded (audio) without consent by my direct manager on her mobile phone during a private conversation,” a hospitality worker says.

“It wasn’t dealt with properly at the time that I complained about it. Therefore I feel targeted and don’t feel safe at work.”

The shift to working from home amplified worker surveillance. Picture: iStock

The Victorian Trades Hall Council goes into detail comparing international and state-by-state surveillance laws inside workplaces, but the collective union body deems privacy on social media as another key issue.

“Employers are not agents of law enforcement, psychiatrists or priests – the private lives of working people are none of their business,” the Victorian Trades Hall Council says.

“It is not their place to meticulously monitor workers’ personality dispositions, who they sit with at lunch, who their friends are, where they go on their breaks, their political beliefs, when they go to bed, how they spend their weekends, whether they use their leave, their gender identity or their medical histories.”

The state parliament inquiry has finished taking public submissions, and held its first public hearing on Tuesday. There are two more hearings scheduled for late September.

The French privacy watchdog fined Amazon’s French warehouse business €32m in January for an “excessively intrusive system” which monitored worker performance and activity. Amazon says it is appealing the “factually incorrect” Judgement. Picture: NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

The Victorian Chamber of Commerce says haphazard workplace surveillance legislation which required ongoing amendments would compromise business investment, innovation and productivity.

There are already state-based workplace surveillance laws for email, internet usage, GPS and camera surveillance, the chamber says in its submissions, plus regulations and protections in industry codes, employer agreements and enterprise agreements.

“The Victorian Chamber believes that the existing legislative and regulatory framework is adequate and can be relied upon to address workplace harms arising from workplace surveillance.”

Employers in the ACT must provide workers with access to surveillance data about them if requested in writing, but that is not the case in NSW or Victoria. Picture: iStock

There are a host of programs available which are overtly made to “monitor, control and respond to what employees do on their computers and phones”, as once such firm InterGuard spruiks.

The Queensland University of Technology submission to the Victorian inquiry singles out InterGuard, and other pieces of software which automatically generate data, alerts or emails about workers’ device use and productivity.

Gig economy workers have been particularly disadvantaged by the surveillance as it directly affects pay.

“In ‘regular’ workplaces, new workforce optimisation and productivity management technologies may not position surveillance and monitoring of workers as their primary function, but nevertheless be a central and frequently hidden feature,” the Queensland University of Technology researchers say.

Originally published as Union group takes aim at bosses ‘social media trawling’